From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Things are more complex in the Gospels, where we must take into account the different editorial layers, using the most well-founded hypotheses of “source criticism,” which recognizes Mark’s priority and the existence of a proto-Mark. In its primitive version, the Gospel of Mark was probably content with this: “Having risen in the morning on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary of Magdala from whom he had cast out seven devils. She then went to those who had been his companions, and who were mourning and in tears, and told them. But they did not believe her when they heard her say that he was alive and that she had seen him. After this, he showed himself under another form to two of them as they were on their way into the country. These went back and told the others, who did not believe them either. Lastly, he showed himself to the Eleven themselves while they were at table. He reproached them for their incredulity and obstinacy, because they had refused to believe those who had seen him after he had risen” (Mark 16:9–14).

  The preceding passage, Mark 16:1–8, gives a different account, actually borrowed and edited from Matthew 28:1–10: Mary Magdalene and one other woman (two in Mark) go to the tomb. “And suddenly there was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled away the stone and sat on it. His face was like lightning, his robe white as snow” (Matthew 28:2–3). The angel told them: “He is not here, for he has risen, as he said he would. Come and see the place where he lay, then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has risen from the dead and now he is going ahead of you to Galilee; that is where you will see him.’ Look! I have told you” (28:6–7). Then, as they left the tomb, they saw Jesus “coming to meet them,” and heard him tell them the very same message: “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers that they must leave for Galilee; there they will see me” (28:9–10). We detect within this narrative a duplication: An editor rewrote the scene to distinguish the “angel of the Lord” from Jesus, who were one in the original narrative, the angel of the Lord being none other than the ascended spirit of Christ. The angel is the encrypted form of the spirit of Christ, reminiscent of Jesus’s own statement that, when one rises from the dead, one is like “angels in heaven.”

  There is reason to believe that the motifs of the rolled stone and the empty tomb, which “materialize” an originally purely spiritual apparition, are motifs invented by Matthew and later added in Mark. Paul, whose epistles are older than the Gospels, makes no allusion to the empty tomb. This tendency to transform the supernatural appearances of Christ into a physical resurrection of his corpse was further strengthened by Luke, in which the resurrected Christ himself undertakes to combat what is now heresy: “See by my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have” (Luke 24:39). Here the Maccabean conception of the resurrection of the martyrs has overcome the primitive spiritualist conception of proto-Mark and Paul.

  This primitive conception, henceforth designated “Gnostic,” was fought by the faction that, after long controversies and with the support of imperial power, eventually determined the doctrinal basis of the Church of Rome and controlled its canon. The first Alexandrian church, in any case, was certainly Gnostic. (The only two Christians of Alexandria known before the end of the second century were the Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus.)119 It is now generally accepted, following Walter Bauer and Robert Moore, that heresy precedes orthodoxy on the historical timeline. Church orthodoxy is not a pure doctrine from which heresies deviate, but a construction completed in the fourth century on the ruins of those Christian currents it excluded by declaring them heresies.120

  The oldest known Gnostic texts are the Coptic papyrus codices discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, dating from 350–400 but translating Greek texts probably going back to 140. One of them, the Letter of Peter to Philip, tells that after Jesus’s death, the disciples were praying on Mont Olive when “a great light appeared, so that the mountain shone from the sight of him who had appeared. And a voice called out to them saying ‘Listen … I am Jesus Christ, who is with you forever.’” In another Gnostic text, The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, the disciples were likewise gathered on a mountain after Jesus’s death, when “then there appeared to them the Redeemer, not in his original form but in the invisible spirit. But his appearance was the appearance of a great angel of light.”121

  These accounts resemble those of the Transfiguration in Mark 9. Critical exegetes have long suspected that the Transfiguration was, in the primitive narrative (Proto-Mark), a scene of Resurrection, which was then shifted before the Crucifixion, perhaps in the context of the struggle against Gnosticism.122 According to this hypothesis, it was originally the risen Jesus (transfigured by death into dazzling whiteness) who appeared together with Moses and Elijah and disappeared with them. But in the version we now have, Peter, James, and John were praying with Jesus on a mountain, when “in their presence he was transfigured: his clothes became brilliantly white, whiter than any earthly bleacher could make them. Elijah appeared to them with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus.” Peter addressed Jesus. “Then suddenly, when they looked round, they saw no one with them any more but only Jesus” (Mark 9:2–8). A discussion follows in which Jesus asks the three apostles not to talk about their vision until he “rises from the dead.” Why this request? Is this an awkward way for the editor who shifted the narrative to hide his fraud and explain why no one had heard about the Transfiguration story before? In doing so, he betrays the fact that Transfiguration and Resurrection were initially one.

  The hypothesis of a post-Easter apparition of the risen Christ shifted before Easter and applied to the earthly Jesus can also be applied to the brief narrative where the disciples saw Jesus walking on the waters and “thought it was a ghost and cried out” (Mark 6:49). The result is a story that, since time immemorial, offers itself to ridicule—less so in the version of Mark, it is true, than in the elaboration of Matthew (14:22–33), in which Peter imitates Jesus and takes a few steps on the waters himself, before sinking for lack of faith.

  If I have dwelled on these points of critical exegesis, it is not for the pleasure of deconstructing the conventional Gospel narrative, but to show that the earliest legend of Jesus, which belonged to a Greek spiritualist and heroic paradigm, underwent a materialistic transformation or Judaization. Other cases will be examined later. The suppression of the so-called Gnostic faith, and the imposition of a creed affirming that Jesus physically exited his tomb, can hardly be considered a minor detail in the religious history of our civilization.

  The Return of Osiris and Isis

  The historian of religions cannot help but notice that the crucified and risen Christ is equivalent to Osiris dismembered and resurrected. This parallel, first made by Gerald Massey in The Natural Genesis (1883), in no way undermines the historical truth of Jesus’s life, since, as Carl Jung argued in Answer to Job, mythic patterns are embodied in real lives. The mythical equivalence of Christ and Osiris must be considered as a primordial factor in the success of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world. Christianity’s encounter with the philosophical currents of Alexandria (especially Neo-Platonism) only accentuated this Osirian character. The cult of Osiris and Isis had spread throughout the Mediterranean basin since the beginning of the first millennium BCE, absorbing a large number of other cults on its way. Its encounter and fusion with Christian worship is therefore exceptional only in the fact that it was Christ who absorbed Osiris, and not the other way around.

  Another remarkable case of a hero whose worship was superimposed on that of Osiris is that of Antinous, a young man beloved by the emperor Hadrian, who died in the Nile in the year 130 CE. His death was immediately interpreted as a sacrificial act to appease the Nile, whose catastrophic floods in the last two years were threatening Egypt with famine. Some also said that Antinous had cut short his life to prolong the life of the suffering emperor. The cult of Antinous, assimilated to a new avatar of Osiris
, spread from Egypt throughout the empire with the encouragement of Hadrian, notwithstanding the horrified protests of the Christians. It involved mysteries, games, and oracles; and a tablet found in Antinopolis, the city founded in his honor, shows him as a “divinity of the dead” (nekyodaimon). Although it seems to have been welcomed with enthusiasm in the Near East, the cult of Antinous declined soon after the death of Hadrian. Historians have held that Antinous was the lover (eromenos) of Hadrian, and his worship the mere caprice of a grieving emperor. But this interpretation derives both from the Christian slanders and from the Historia Augusta, a Roman chronicle today considered a forgery. What is certain is that Antinous was perceived and honored as the incarnation of an ideal of human perfection; his face and his body, sculpted in thousands of copies, became the canon of youthful beauty in the Greco-Roman world.123

  Christianity’s Osirian root is the best-kept secret of church historians. That Christ is, to some extent, the mythical double of Osiris, and that the overwhelming success of his cult is largely due to this resemblance, have always been embarrassing facts for the Church. For this reason, the importance of the cult of Osiris in the Greco-Roman world has long been underestimated. Yet, on the margins of clerical culture, there is evidence that the myth of Osiris and his kinship with the legend of Christ was still known in the Middle Ages. The proof is none other than Le Conte du Graal (or Roman de Perceval) by Chrétien de Troyes, a roman à clef with multiple levels of meaning written around 1180. One finds there the undeniable trace of the story of Osiris, Horus, and Seth, incarnated respectively by the Fisher King, Perceval, and Chevalier Vermeil.124

  If Osiris gradually took on the features of Christ during the first centuries of our era, Isis, his sister-wife, continued her career in the form of the Virgin Mary, whose worship was sanctioned in the fourth century by the Council of Ephesus. Indeed, Isis had been called “the mother of god” (Theotokos) centuries before the term was applied to Mary in Egypt and Syria.125 During the Hellenistic period, Isis had in fact taken the ascendancy over Osiris. Already assimilated in the Near East to Ishtar, Asherah, or Astarte, she had been syncretically enriched by the attributes of Demeter, Artemis, and Aphrodite, to which the Romans added Diana and Venus. Numerous place names testify to her importance in Gaul; the very name of Paris could derive from Bar-Isis, namely the “Mount of Isis,” the old name of the Sainte-Geneviève hill.126

  The cult of Isis is associated with that of Horus, known to the Greeks as Harpocrates (a transcription of the Egyptian Har pa khrad, “Horus the child”). Horus is conceived miraculously (from a supernatural father) at the spring equinox, at the time of harvest and, like the baby Jesus, is born every year at the winter solstice, to revive the Light. The birth of the divine child is, in both cases, inscribed in a history of salvation, a victory over evil and death. Isis hid Horus to protect him from the evil uncle whom he was destined to overthrow, just as Mary hid Jesus—in Egypt precisely—to save him from King Herod, who was determined to get rid of “the infant king of the Jews” (Matthew 2:2). The birth of Horus announces the defeat of Seth, who reigned on earth since he killed Osiris. Isis is often represented in a majestic position holding the young Horus on her lap, sometimes suckling him, and her representations are difficult to distinguish from those of the Virgin suckling the infant Jesus in the first Christian art, which were modeled after them.127 Many representations of Isis were reassigned to the Virgin Mary and worshiped under her name during the Middle Ages. Such is the case with the famous Black Virgins produced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries in the western Mediterranean basin. (There are nearly two hundred in the south of France).

  The cult of Isis survived until the High Middle Ages, especially in the rural world (the term paganus means “peasant”). Only in the twelfth century was it totally supplanted by the cult of the Virgin Mary, who suddenly assumed an overwhelming place in Christian liturgy, as the mediator between Christ and his church. Bernard de Clairvaux (1090–1153) was the main promoter of this new piety, which served to Christianize all sanctuaries once dedicated to Isis, including innumerable holy wells. He coined the expression “Our Lady” (“Notre Dame”), or rather applied it to Mary for the first time, as well as other titles such as “Queen of Heaven.” All Cistercian monasteries founded under his tutelage were dedicated to Our Lady, and all the Gothic cathedrals from then on were consecrated to her.

  Isis is above all the wife of Osiris, and the texts of her lamentations of mourning, which bring Osiris back to life, played an important part in the Isiac ceremonies: “O beautiful adolescent suddenly departed, vigorous young man for whom it was not the season, come back to us in your first form.”128 It is said that when Osiris died, Isis was so desperate that her flood of tears caused the Nile to flood, which is why the summer night when the warning signs of the flood appear is called the “Night of Tears.”129 Likewise, the Mary of late antiquity sheds tears as she clings to the foot of the cross. “I am overwhelmed by love, and cannot endure having to stay in the room, when you are on the wood of the cross,” writes Romanos the Melodist in a hymn to Mary in the sixth century. At the end of the Middle Ages, the theme of Mater Dolorosa and the Latin poem Stabat Mater expressed a widespread devotion to Mary, promoted in particular by the Franciscan order.

  Mary is like the second Eve standing by the side of the second Adam, an idea illustrated on many church tympans where Mary and Jesus sit side by side. However, strictly speaking, the Virgin Mary is not the bride of Christ, and the conjugal love that binds Isis to Osiris is absent from Christian mythology. Not only is Mary’s virginity her most holy attribute, but the very idea that Jesus might have loved a woman in the flesh is anathema to Christian doctrine. Yet, isn’t it remarkable that, among the three temptations of Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:1–11), none is related to sexuality, which suggests that it had not yet been “demonized” at the time of the writing of the Gospels. The Gospel story shows Jesus surrounded by women who passionately admired him, and it is to Mary of Magdala, a follower of the first hour, that the resurrected Jesus first appeared (Mark 16:9). This is strangely reminiscent of the folktale motif of the departed young man appearing post-mortem to the love of his life—or, for that matter, of Osiris mourned, buried, and resurrected by his sister-lover Isis. Such tales are, of course, out of place in Christian tradition; they are the raw materials of medieval romance and courtly poetry, whose authors, as Denis de Rougemont has correctly observed (L’Amour et l’Occident, 1938), have sometimes self-consciously served an alternative religion.

  The Return of Yahweh

  Resurrectionism, in the sense of a material conception of anastasis (with body emerging from the grave) is of Maccabean and Pharisaical inspiration; it is contrary both to the preaching of Jesus and to the outlook of the first known author of his legend (proto-Mark), who adopted a Hellenistic view of life after death (“like angels in heaven”). Can we therefore call this doctrine, enshrined in dogma, a “Judaization” of the Gospel message? This might seem paradoxical, since Jesus was Jewish; we are used to seeing things in reverse. We hear about the “paganization” of primitive Christianity, when the community of “Jewish Christians” (Jews admitting the messiahship of Jesus) was gradually supplanted by the “pagan Christians” (pagans converted by Paul and his emulators). But the point of view I have adopted here is that the original message of Christ, although destined for the Jews, broke with institutional Judaism (Pharisee as well as Sadducee), and was closer to spiritualist conceptions widespread in the Hellenistic world, including among Hellenized Jews.

  There is another fundamental element of the Christian imagination that deserves to be seen as a Judaization of the message of Christ: apocalypticism. The scholarly consensus today rejects the authenticity of the apocalyptic prophecies attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, because they are contradictory to the hope of the Reign of God that typifies Jesus’s message.130 Jesus even seems to have openly criticized apocalyptic expectations: “The coming of the
kingdom of God does not admit of observation and there will be no one to say, ‘Look, it is here! Look, it is there!’ For look, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20–21). Jesus was aiming for a social transformation inspired by the Spirit of the Father and the radical ethics of his Sermon on the Mount, not a supernatural and cataclysmic mutation of the world. Nothing expresses better the gradual maturation of the Reign than the “organic” parables of Jesus in Mark, recognized as having the highest claim to authenticity: “What can we say that the kingdom is like? What parable can we find for it? It is like a mustard seed which, at the time of its sowing, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth. Yet once it is sown it grows into the biggest shrub of them all and puts out big branches so that the birds of the air can shelter in its shade” (Mark 4:30–32). These birds may be a metaphor for angels or celestial spirits that dwell among men when they live fraternally. This parable, and other similar images, are found in the Gospel of Thomas, a text preserved in a Coptic (Egyptian) version and today considered as old as the canonical Gospels, but rejected from the canon because of its “Gnosticizing” tendencies.